In My Time of Dying
by Saki-Lyn
Summary: American best friends Kelsie, Natalie, Amanda and Synthia have a peculiar secret: the personified Countrykind you know and love from Hetalia? They've met them. In fact, they've more than met them. They've become "Patriots" to Nations Germany, Switzerland, Russia and Japan. They may not be Nations, but they're the ones standing behind them. But their loyalty is about to be tested...
1. Chapter 1 Ace of Clubs

**Saki: **Hello there, whoever it is that you are. This is my first story on . Please forgive any horrible mistakes; I'm learning. I originally wrote this for my three friends (and if you haven't realized already, _they _are the main protagonists, along with, um… me), but they've agreed to allow me to publish it online for the world to enjoy. So, enjoy. And if you have the time and heart, please drop a friendly review.

**Summary: **An introduction to Kelsie Wulfgram, Patriot of Germany and the first of four heroines in this story. She's also the Queen of Clubs, hence the title of this chapter.

**1. Ace of Clubs**

A girl named Kelsie rolls over and scrapes the sleep from her eyes.

"Uuugh," she groans.

She flips her bedraggled self upright. Her caramel-colored hair is in an atrocious state, despite it being cropped shorter than most girls would dare. It feels to her as if every strand is standing rebelliously stick straight. She'll deal with them later. With chocolate brown eyes, she looks around, suspicious. Always suspiciously looking around, she is, out of a diehard, well-trained habit. She's in some sort of countryside, in a car…

…and they return to her, all at once, in malicious torrents of muddled thoughts and feelings. Memories.

_Last night…_ she thinks, _oh, mother…last night…_

**-xXx-**

_After the eternity of five high-powered minutes, the car chase is over._

_The former pursuers and their vehicles are now totaled. Kelsie looks at the three wrecked automobiles with the eyes of a car lover and can't help but appreciate their sleek and speedy design. Buried partway in the ditch are two gem-sparkling Audis and one gleaming silver Porsche. Too bad there's nothing but the junk yard in their future._

_As for their drivers, they look as if they'd jumped into a human-sized food processor set on high. Kelsie smiles darkly. Her man's got one hell of a powerful gun with him. And one hell of an aim. There's no way any one of them is still alive._

"_Who are they?" Kelsie asks. "Or rather, who were they?"_

"_Country-hunters," he replies. "Apparently, there's this new idea spreading around that the world would be better off without them, so they've begun to hunt us down. Vash has been having fun with them for weeks now, and I hear the cult has been around in America for years." He gives Kelsie another one of his sly sideways looks. "It's one reason why I brought you to Germany. To get you away from them. I didn't think they'd follow us."_

"_Huh."_

"_Aren't you scared? You know they could've killed you."_

"_Not really. Not when you're with me. Come on. I don't want to be caught here when the cops come. I've heard stuff about the German police, and they do not sound like a happy bunch."_

_Kelsie walks off into the night, heading back toward their sleek black Mercedes. He follows several precarious paces behind her, his mind preoccupied and muddled. But he knows the antidote for his headache. He knows her well._

**-xXx-**

She smiles warmly as she rubs her bare shoulders, trying to expel the early autumnal chill from them. Looking her left shoulder, she sees her tattoo. It's a black club - as in the playing cards suit - with a small red spade nestled at the heart of it. Her three friends each have a corresponding version, all in the same place on their left shoulders. It's how they remember each other whenever they drift their separate ways.

She keeps on smiling. It goes without saying that Kelsie wishes she could travel back in time and wrap herself in the night all over again. I addition to the aforementioned high speed chase, the previous night had included a bar, a sexy hot car, some music, a few kisses, and him. Always him, with his hardwired muscles and his lemon licked candle tongue blonde hair. He wore that hair slicked back, sort of like Elvis Presley, but in a much more refined and respectable way than the King. His eyes had shone so very icy last night, icy blue like Norwegian fjords. Of course, nothing _too_ overwhelmingly intimate had happened; he'd said she was too young. Nonetheless, she desperately wants a replay. The memories are magnetic.

It's the ruddy backlands of Germany, the countryside. It's a soulless black Mercedes-Benz SLX, the car. She'd been sleeping in the passenger seat, which is leaning back as far as it can go, a makeshift bed. She smiles as she remembers the reason for that. A push, a pull. An intensity. Her blanket is a tired old jacket, German army-issue. It smells deeply of cologne, but the wearer of the jacket and the cologne isn't present at the moment. By some inexplicable instinct, she knows that from the first sniff. Doglike, she is. But she also knows he can't be that far away. There's no place to go. They are parked in the middle of pure and utter nowhere.

She readjusts her seat-bed, rolls down a window, and tosses out a name.

"Ludwig…"

Germany.

**Saki:** So there you go. The flashback is from a story I wrote for Kelsie a long looong time ago

**Next Chapter: **is all about the Patriot of Switzerland / Queen of Hearts. And Vash Zwingli himself. He's kinda-sorta there, too.

**Disclaimer: **I do not own APHetalia, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Audi, or the country of Germany. And this will probably be the most extensive disclaimer I will ever write.


	2. Chapter 2 Ace of Hearts

**2. Ace of Hearts**

A girl named Natalie sits contentedly, the sun shimmering like a blessing on her waist-length winter blonde hair. Her heart-shaped face beams up at the sky. Her steel blue eyes are grinning stars, and her lips form the shape of a smile to match, one of those purely iridescent ones you typically find artificially plastered to the faces of supermodels in magazines. The difference between those and hers is that hers is very real.

She's very happy.

She's with a man with the strange name of Vash.

Otherwise known as Switzerland.

Wiry and blonde, he's somewhat of a boyfriend. He had never used the word, and she had never asked, but they've spent a lot of time together. A lot. So, Natalie hadn't felt too guilty when she'd dashed off to Europe with him without even telling her three closest friends._ They'll survive without me for a few weeks_, she'd reckoned. She and her three closest friends are like sisters. They had the tattoos to prove it, didn't they?

She looks to hers now. Today, she is wearing one of her signature off-the-shoulder shirts, white and gossamer, so the place at the very top of her left arm is easily visible. There it is: a black heart about the width of a playing card with a red diamond nestled inside.

Her friends had once been the most important things in the world to her. They still are, but now Vash is mixed in there somewhere, too. The four of them all share residency in her heart, but she couldn't help but wonder whether or not Vash had more room in there. Love does screwy things to your priorities.

The two of them are at a mansion, a typically stuffy mansion under the even stuffier ownership of Roderich Edelstein, aka Austria. Natalie has trouble talking to Roderich, as does Vash, but yet here they are, at his mansion.

Switzerland had explained to her that it was the Germanic family reunion, an assembly the likes of which hasn't been seen since before the Second World War. It was the type of occasion you only miss if you have a desire to be shunned by the other members of your immortal family for the rest of eternity.

Thus, Switzerland had complied with the invitation and come, dragging Natalie along with the promise of introducing her to his lacy little sister, Liechtenstein. Oddly enough, several countries including Germany have yet to show, and this seems weird because Natalie had always taken him to be the most punctual breathing being on the planet.

They had been sitting outside together on the estate's grounds, at a gossamer white cast iron table set within Austria's admittedly beautiful garden. Switzerland had abruptly decided that the moment called for some lemonade and dashed insanely back to the mansion, blushing red as posies as he went. Natalie had snickered at his abruptness – he's always making excuses when he's embarrassed. And he's embarrassed quite often.

"What's taking him so long?" she asks the glistening flowers, impatient. It's been a while since he'd so fleetingly rushed off, maybe an hour or two. "What could he possibly be doing?"

Natalie doesn't worry, though. Switzerland worries enough for the both of them and then some.

Instead, she keeps up her smile.

"He'll come back," she reassures herself. "He always comes back."


	3. Chapter 3 Ace of Spades

**3. Ace of Spades: **

A girl named Amanda lifts a porcelain teapot and pours. Honey streaked liquid splashes giddily from the spout and into a waiting cup. A clatter echoes as the delicate cup is laid to rest artfully atop its corresponding saucer.

Amanda doesn't smile.

Most would prefer it if she did. Her default expression consisted of a small pursed mouth set under mournful colorless eyes and topped by unruly brown shoulder-length hair. Most read her as unapproachable, and it'd be quite the hard-pressed challenge to disagree with them now. Oblivious to the world around her, she continues, methodically pouring the appropriate amount of tea into each of the six cups, and then stirring in the necessary cream and sugar. She neatly sets a single cookie at each place. Mexican wedding cookies, stuffed with sugar, butter, and almonds. The girl's favorite. But those eyes of hers are haunted.

And still she doesn't smile.

Her desolate tea party is staged on a home-sewn quilt stretched out in the middle of a meadow. Her invisible guests are kneeling beside her, at the center of summer's Siberia. Her dress is a lacey black spider web, complemented by a pair of shadowy arm-length gloves and a black feathered headpiece buried within the mass of her problematic hair. The sky looms above her, and like a wizened old grandfather, it watches her, through turbulent gray eyebrows and a deeply concerned frown.

"What are you doing?"

He appears out of nowhere, as he sometimes does. A tall man with stormcloud-flavored hair and a child's smile. Russia.

Amanda calmly looks up and out of her private world. Even now, upon seeing _him_, her expression remains hollow.

"I was feeling a bit nostalgic, though I couldn't begin to explain why. I never played tea party as a younger girl."

Russia says nothing. His amethyst eyes are tormented. An Eastern Orthodox crucifix on the blackest batwing of chains dangles from his neck, set against his suit-wearing chest. It had been a gift from Amanda. She always says he looks best with black. He's been wearing it loyally for just over two years now.

"Would you like some?" Amanda asks, miles away.

He takes a place at the party. He's her first visible guest, dressed in the most appropriate of Victorian suits and topped by a top hat. All his fellow guests stare at him haughtily with their nonexistent eyes. She fills for him the seventh cup. The lucky seventh.

"I'm glad you're here," she says.

"Where else would I be?" he asks.

"Oh, I don't know," she turns away, glancing at her left shoulder and the ink that colors it. A black spade with a red heart buried within. "I just felt that cliché premonition. The one you get when something bad is about to happen."

**-xXx-**


	4. Chapter 4 Two of Hearts

**4. Two of Hearts**

The sun is gone.

Maybe it had never even been there. Natalie isn't sure. When she is with Vash, it always seems to be shining, a fruity yellow omnipresence. Or maybe that isn't it either. Maybe Vash _is _the sun.

She walks with familiar strides down a corridor in Austria's mansion, her blonde hair following like a wave of honey behind her. To her right, the resentful sky is spilling in through the windows. These windows split the wall from floor to ceiling, thus allowing the sky to fill the whole of the hall with its decrepit presence. To examine things from a different perspective, through those windows and beneath that sky is a lovely panoramic view of the Austrian countryside, the Austrian Alps, and the Austrian villages.

Natalie can't stand to look at any of it.

There are two reasons.

For one, it's impossible to appreciate the great majesty of it all without being mentally assaulted by the image of the owner's sniveling, mole-inscribed, _Austrian _face.

She laughs darkly.

She laughs in hopes of avoiding the second, more definitive reason why she can't look:

The last time she'd raked in that splendor, her Switzi had been raking it with her. Now, he is gone. Gone. That profoundly empty four-lettered word. He never did return from that mission of his to obtain lemonade. She had waited excruciating hours for him to reappear, but he never did. She had scorched the entire manor with her searching, but he refused to be found.

She keeps walking.

It's something to do, something to distract her fluttering butterfly thoughts. Her objective is to stay in one piece.

She arrives at a door.

It's standing to her left, opposite the wall-splitting windows, and seems to be peering through them, but of course, it sees nothing. It's a wooden door. Wood is not graced with the gift of sight. Like any other door, it has a knob. A handle. Something with which to open it.

Natalie does so gratefully.

A memory is waiting, cross-legged, inside.

**-xXx-**

"_Hey Nat! I found something I think you're gonna like."_

_Natalie looks up and out of the other world she'd been in, the world inside her current book, the world of __The Fault in Our Stars__. She's stretched unconcernedly atop a comforting plush chair in one of Austria's mansion's many corridors, reading that book, when she hears that voice._

_A girl named Ana is the speaker of those words. Ana is tall, dark, and slender, like a whip. She acts the part, too. She's a friend of cousin Prussia's, and fits that role like a glove. But Nat speculates that the sexy older girl is more than just a friend to lewd Prussia._

_Ana is nineteen, but she doesn't act her age. Usually._

_She gestures for Natalie to follow her down a particular corridor, and Nat knows better than to argue. Ana's tolerable, mostly, but when people don't bend to her will, things get dicey._

_Natalie walks behind, careful to stay close but not too close to the girl whose long black hair swishes back and forth, back and forth, as she strides swiftly along. Nat wonders what Prussia must think about all that magnificent hair._

_After some time spent striding: "Here it is: my most recent awesome find." She uses the word "awesome" quite often. Too often._

_Ana points triumphantly to an honestly ordinary door. Nat opens it._

_What Natalie sees inside makes her pause and take a moment to appreciate the fact that Ana had so accurately realized that _it_ is what makes her happiest, aside from Vash and her friends of course. Ana had thought about someone other than herself for once. It's a miracle._

"_This is…amazing." Natalie breathes. "How did you find it?"_

"_Well… you know." Ana temporarily dismounts her staggering ego: she looks down at her feet. "I like to explore the crazy music man's big house, and I came across this and… thought you might like it." She shrugs and looks up sharply. "You _do _like it, don't you?"_

"_Of course I do!" Natalie replies, jerking a step forward. "I love it." She steals another hungry glance through the doorframe. To borrow a phrase of Prussia and Ana's lexicon: "It's freaking awesome!" _

"_Not as awesome as me, though." Ana huffs._

"_Of course not." A slightly sarcastic laugh._

_Silly Natalie's grin just keeps going._

**-xXx-**

As she peers into the confined room now for the twenty-sixth time, Natalie does not smile. Now, there is no joy in what sits inside this room, there is no joy in anything.

But it's time to tease away those cobwebs.

At least for the moment.

The room's near vacancy is made visible by a single bulb dangling humbly from a wire. Inside, there is nothing but a piano, a grand piano, waiting expectantly for someone to play it. Its black wood skin is gone; stripped away by a faceless intention. Its strings are naked, exposed. All its countless hammers and dampers are out in the open; anyone can see them, watch them kiss the strings. Its heavy bloated body balances precariously on what remains of its three spindly legs. The only pieces left wholly intact are its keys, which are real ebony and real ivory: real harmony, not some cheap plastic imitation of it. The piano is old but amazingly not out of tune, and it has been waiting patiently in its quaint closet for quite some time now, waiting for her.

Natalie.

She steps up to it, reverently. She pulls out its bench and sits down, formally. She greets the instrument like she would a respected friend. In a way, she bows to it.

Her fingertips meet the keys, and she begins to play. Begins to forget where she is and who she is and why she is: she just plays. Her entire existence revolves around the music, the invisible yet visible music. She plays. She has no written plan to lead her, no map to guide her. All of what she plays is direct from the very depths of her soul.

The song starts out harsh and hateful, the notes crashing down forcefully in a malevolent torrent, but gradually the anger fades and is replaced by solemn despair. The despair stretches out longer. Minor notes glide off the piano's bare strings like paper airplanes on a breeze and float and fill the room with their tears. They rebound off the unscarred walls and come back and hit Natalie full in the chest, but she brushes past the pain and keeps on, obsessively folding more and more paper airplanes. She does not stop, because stopping means facing a pain much more menacing. The pain of not knowing.

The notes are conversing, too. They form rational words that bump into hysterical ones. "_Where is he…? Where is he where is he where is he? He said he'd be back. He always comes back. Why did he leave me? Where is he? Where is he…?" _The words scream in Natalie's chest right where the planes stab her. But there's only panic on the inside. Her face remains deceptively calm. Perplexingly expressionless. Her expression is the forlorn song she plays.

No one can hear her. A while back, Austria had grown paranoid enough to soundproof every wall in his house, out of the fear that someone could and would steal his all-important musical ideas of "genius."

No one can hear her.

That's quite important to her. No one should have to hear her like this, freaking out over a few measly hours of missing-ness. Miner. Minor. No one should have to hear her minor.

But of course, someone inevitably does.

That someone comes bursting into the room quite suddenly, like a salty ocean wave you weren't expecting. The wave is a young boy named Robert.

"Natalie! Natalie!" he gasps, hands on his knees, his breath stolen by his energetic entrance.

"_What, _Robert?" Natalie asks, stiffly frozen mid-keystroke and flat-out _annoyed. _She swivels herself around on the bench to face him: the interruption. She glares halfheartedly.

He's younger than she is, Robert. He had just claimed his fourteenth year a few weeks prior to the reunion. He looks it, too, his face chock full of youth and his sandy brown hair as smooth as whipped cream. He doesn't bear a scrap of acne anywhere. Natalie is envious of that.

"I… I just…" he stammers, his pool blue eyes mournful. "I can't find Lili anywhere."

Natalie softens. She had forgotten about the Nations that weren't eternally neutral. But she remembers them now, as she lets her butterfly thoughts ramble: as far as she knew, there were thirteen other countries invited to the reunion other than Switzi: Germany, Prussia, Hungary, Liechtenstein, Britain, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and of course, their host: Austria. Together with her Vash, the list is the length of fourteen Nations. Hungary had only been invited because she's Austria's ex-wife; she isn't actually Germanic. Britain and the Nordic cousins haven't made it to a reunion in centuries, and Germany, Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium have yet to be seen: they are late. Why are so many late? How the heck is _Germany _late?

The only plausible answer that presented itself: something went wrong. Something went wrong. Very wrong. The word is like an extremely flat note that refuses to be tuned. Wrong. _It would've helped if that epiphany would've come a bit sooner, _Natalie thinks sarcastically. The thing is, it had. Ever since Vash had left her in the garden, she had known. She had just been too stubborn to accept it.

Robert is still looking up to her hopefully. The reason he had come to her is written within his eyes: she is his elder, therefore she can and will help him. She will return his Liechtenstein to him and make everything all better. If not, then no one can.

Natalie continues on with her glaring for a few more moments, piecing the broken shards of herself back together.

She moves on.

"Where are the others?" she asks Robert pointedly.

"Huh?"

"You heard me. Where are the other Countries?"

"Oh. Uh… I only looked for Lili," he admits quietly. "I miss her so much, and it's only been a few hours. I'm scared, Natalie," he adds, his voice a shivering whisper.

The sadness comes back and slugs Natalie in the face. She stiffens, not wanting to spill tears in front of Robert. She had temporarily forgotten that other people could feel emotions just as deep.

"Robert," she says, gentle as lavender bath soap this time. "Liechtenstein and the others, they're probably all gone."

_Vash didn't tell me he was leaving, therefore they're gone, _she thinks, using the thought as an absolute conclusion. Now came the time to do something about it.

"Go find Chester, Ana, and Athena, and tell them to meet me in the garage," she tells the soggy boy. "We leave in fifteen minutes."


End file.
